“But why?” I said.
“Because you and your brother are the first visitors we’ve had in many wheels. You have felt and heard too much of Mictlán.”
“But it can’t be,” I said. “Don’t all the souls of the dead pass through here? Don’t they get to see the Coil, too?”
When I said this, the hummingbird let out a howl too, and as she joined the Xolotl, I felt in their cries the fear of children who see monsters inside the woods at night, and the chill that young women feel in the dark when they walk in an empty parking lot in the city at 2 a.m.
“We will collect the creature you call your brother,” the Xolotl said. “It’s time that you saw the dead you speak of.”
And then the hummingbird spoke, too, in a voice that sounded like water, and like steel bending under thousands of pounds of force.
“But once we show you these wonders,” the hummingbird said, “you will forever know the taste of death, the way it cools the back of your neck, the way it steals the breath.”
“Once you see the dead, don’t ever say you’re sorry,” the Xolotl screamed, and we soared up above the temple. José María waved at us as we approached him, and then suddenly the world—this place of black lakes, thick canyons and gigantic snakes—felt like the worst place I had ever experienced in my life.
“Why would I be sorry?” I said.
“Because the Ocullín is following you,” the Xolotl said. “And he’s got your name on his lips.”
THE OCULLÍN
“Dahmer, Speck and Gacy: They all set foot in Chicago, and each one of them carried an evil that felt like it was from another world.” –
Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer,
Sathomé Harrison, Grand Monarch Press, 1991.
“We used evil to build a city. Its resulting buildings, plumbing systems, highways and public parks became an automatic sequence. Day by day, we built a metropolis. We enjoyed prosperity in the city of Chicago, until the fire interrupted it Death did not look too kindly upon us, but what a story she told.” – Jonathan O’Clanaghan, City Commissioner, regarding the recovery of bodies after the Great Chicago Fire. Stefan Muth,
The American Occult City: Profiles of Five Men.
October 11, 1871, Velocifero Press.
“They’re all going to laugh at you.” – Nursery rhyme and meme. Era of origin unknown.
José María did not fear the ride on the back of the hummingbird. In fact, he was too quick to jump on its back. The animal bristled, and her feathers grew coarse and sharp until he had learned to sing her name.
José María rode up front, while I sat sandwiched between him and the Xolotl.
We flew right in through one of the open doors of the temple of flowers, and soon, we were lost inside.
The grace of the creature we rode, and the music that it made from the way it beat its wings hundreds of times per second took my breath away. I wondered why I had never stopped to marvel at a hummingbird back on Earth. My father had certainly wanted me to stop and look at them many times. So many opportunities wasted.
I used the cones of sound emanating from my shoulders to see where we were going. The places outside this temple—the canyons, rivers and jungles that made up Mictlán—had come into sharp relief because sound illuminated the spiral canyon of this world. I didn’t need eyesight in Mictlán to know the size of the eagles and the smoke owls, or to know that the canyon spanned for thousands of miles. They were full of texture and as vivid as if I could see them with my good eye.
The air became cooler as we took a dive into the lower rooms of the temple.
The cones of sound that radiated from our heads gave us a limited sense of the narrow hallways of this place, but I noticed that this sonar was not as strong down in the depths of this building.
Soon, our cones began to diminish, and it was harder to feel and see what was up ahead.
Then my nose began to twitch. Deep scents vibrated inside it, and suddenly, I could smell so deeply and so far inside this pyramid that I
felt
its walls, its ceilings, its corridors and the pools built into its deepest rooms. I didn’t see the rooms. My nose saw them.
My cones receded down to nothing, but I didn’t panic. My sense of smell illuminated the way now.
This temple was vast, expanding forever, floor after floor, winding like a maze. As I relaxed into the flood of information that my nose gave me, my sense of hearing came back, too. I heard the faint music of the hummingbird wings, the breathing of the Xolotl, and my brother’s grunts as the bird jostled us through our flight through the stairways of the temple.
“José María,” I said, “Can you smell this place like I’m doing right now?”
“My mind is officially blown,” José María said.
The walls around us, the foundations below and the ceilings above our heads left a signature of their makers. As I took in deeper breaths infused with sulfur, berries and the metallic stink of blood, the scents told me who had created this place.
The flowers had built this temple, and the flowers reminded me with the soft music they made, as well as with their smells. The scents there contained notes of daffodils, mignonettes, heliotropes and violets, but other scents wrapped around them. These were smells I had never encountered in my life. They were fragile, pungent and glorious.
Inside this temple, the flowers sang a deep chorus that created rooms, floors and hallways. The architecture of this place was something ancient and completely foreign to any building I had ever been to in my life.
We traveled through many rooms, and we buzzed through many mazes. The wonders inside that temple were more priceless than any gold on earth. The flowers—trillions of them—sang, mourned, cried and made love in this deep dark that smelled of three thousand things, but which was just as black as the outer levels of Mictlán.
“How do you measure time here?” José María said. His voice didn’t echo inside these halls. Instead, the walls ate up his words and garbled them up, retuning their musicality and turning them into mockeries of the originals. The playfulness of the flowers inside this place unsettled me.
The Xolotl snorted, and he sat up straight as he rode the bird. His scent of carrion threaded itself into the air. I could feel his ferocious mouth and his lips peel back to reveal his sharp teeth as he spoke.
“The wheels interlock, one on top of another,” the Xolotl growled. “And from other planes—other angles—many other wheels come together at several points. Then they disperse again. The wheels fly off, and they kiss each other.”
That sounds like poetry, not like the nature of time,
I thought.
“That makes sense up near the mountain where we entered, but I call bullshit,” José María said. The Xolotl’s gnashed his teeth , and the wound-like slits in his chest flared open.
“In fact, if I am not mistaken,” José María continued, “it feels like time is moving at a different pace down
here,
in the lower levels of Mictlán. I have measured it; I know.” He waved his iPhone in his hand.
“The wheels always turn, but time ceases to matter in the lower parts of the Coil,” the Xolotl said. “Your ancestors knew this. Why don’t you? Are you not their children?”
“The Toltecs? The Maya? The Aztecs? We’re supposed to be their children, but, well, we couldn’t tell you exactly how.” I said. “Many generations have passed.”
I had tossed away the notion so many times when my father pressed me to acknowledge it, but now—
“That info got lost, Scooby,” José María said. “The shit got burned by the Spaniards. Didn’t
you
get
that
memo?”
The Xolotl emitted the mournful bell sounds from deep in his belly. The multiple rows of teeth in his mouth flared outward as he drew his jaw open. He licked his lips in hunger.
“The deeper you go in the nine levels of Mictlán, the farther away time will feel for you,” the Xolotl said. “And that’s because time dissolves as we get closer to the Lords. This is how things have always been.”
The hummingbird bucked, and for a moment, it looked as if we might crash into one of the walls of the temple. The flowers sang in a deeper register here, informing me we had traveled miles below the outer shell of the temple. In this level, the flowers gave off the scent of bitter chocolate, blood-red chilies, and sea foam.
“We found our spot,” the Xolotl said. “Step off the hummingbird.”
Our feet sank into layers of flower smells, and their wet juices stained the legs of our jeans. I began to worry about time. How long had we been gone from Chicago?
If time doesn’t matter as much here, will we forget to return?
“Keep up,
reina
,” José María said. “We’re about to see the main event.”
The Xolotl led the way through the dark. His feet also sank into the wet floor, which extended roughly fifty feet ahead of us, where it suddenly stopped. Above us, a massive hall rose hundreds of feet into the air.
And beneath the eerie quietness, I heard the murmur of music beyond the edge of the floor we stood on.
We knelt at the edge of the floor of the temple, next to the Xolotl. I tuned my ears to catch the music around us, the sounds that built images for me. And there it was: beneath us, a giant waterfall. It rang its music in millions of chords.
We stayed there for several minutes, listening to the waterfall. Slowly, a soft hue entered my vision, and for a second I thought it might be made of sound, but—
“José María” I whispered. “Is that—”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s the real thing. Holy crap.”
For the first time in all my journeys inside Mictlán, I saw light.
The light came from the waterfall itself, which originated from a steep wall on our left and flowed downward into the cavern beneath us. Its waters roared out into the wide room and fell hundreds of miles into the depths of the palace.
I let out a long sigh of exhilaration and awe.
Tiny particles of light traveled in the currents of the waterfall, and they twisted and turned like stars inside a galaxy. They emitted a soft glow in shades of sapphire, ruby and rose.
José María let out a long sigh. With his back turned to me, I could see how the lights from inside the water turned him into a shadow and lit the sharp angles of his face. His face glowed pink, violet and blue. Music rushed from his body in a soft hum.
The tiny pinpoints of light that flowed in the waters turned and rotated, twinkling from every angle, sweeping the room with washes of soft light.
He was weeping. He cupped his face in his hands, and as he did so, I felt what he felt, too. There was a sadness beneath this riverbed and waterfall, but dancing over that foundation was something else. Something bright, wide and ample. Something that made me feel I could fly. There was a joy in these particles and the tiny coils of music they gave off from inside the waterfall.
“You see them, Wanderer?” the Xolotl said as his body rang out in bells.
“There’s so many of them,” I said. “It’s like jewel dust.”
“So now you understand my duty in the Coil,” the Xolotl said. “It’s my job to ensure that they travel down the nine rivers to meet the Lords.”
The Xolotl erupted in laughter, and now that I could see his body in the faint glow of the river, I marveled at how old his skin looked. His skin was the same shade of black as that of his dog head, but his claws were white as snow.
Why was he laughing? It made me uneasy. Did they eat souls down here? Were the Lords more monstrous than this dog-headed man?
José María wept openly, but he gathered himself up to a standing position. “Clara. Clara!” he said as he tugged at my shirt.
“What?”
“Arkangel got a couple of details wrong, but this one is spot on. This river, this waterfall, Clara—”
“What is it?”
“Those twinkling particles are
souls
.”
The music of the waterfall intensified. The smells of linen and copper intensified.
“Wanderer,” the Xolotl said. “Perhaps you should stay down in the Coil with us a bit longer. It seems you have much to learn about this place.”
This prospect tempted me, but a voice inside me, deep inside—it told me it would be a one-way ticket.
“This is more complicated than what my parents taught me about the nine levels of Mictlán,” I said. “I must admit, I don’t understand exactly what I’m seeing.”
“Of course you don’t,” the Xolotl said. “The knowledge that you humans have learned about our citizens and our architecture in the Coil is
refracted
.”
“That’s an actual line from a song!” José María screamed. My brother was literally shaking, tapping his feet, running his hands through his coarse hair. “Do you know Arkangel, Xolotl?”
“I know no such word, and I have no knowledge of what you call Arkangel,” the Xolotl said.
José María spread his legs apart and put his hands on his belly. I knew that stance. It was his karaoke warrior pose. It was coming.
Nothing could stop my brother from singing “Cissoid of Diocles” by Arkangel.
“
They traveled far and wide, and when they visited the thirteen secret cities, the visions they felt were galactic and refracted.
”
My brother had a good voice; I had always known that. In this temple made of smells, and in this world of sounds that lit up places like light, he sounded glorious. He sang the line from Arkangel’s song again.
The Xolotl cocked his head and leaned forward to inspect José María. “You are a poet?” he said.
“No, the singers from Arkangel are,” José María said. ‘They sang that line in 2009.”
“That word—two thousand nine—is that the time in your wheels?” the Xolotl said.
“No, not wheels, Scooby. We measure our time in a flat line, like a flower stem.”
The Xolotl opened his jaw wide and licked his lips. He seemed satisfied by my brother’s answer. When he interacted with José María, he was a creature of few words. When he spoke to me, he was full of questions, full of words.
Perhaps he was always constantly evaluating my brother as prey. I hoped this wasn’t the case, but I knew better.